“Hmph. Aphelia, you’re still a monster, like something hauled up from the dark.”

From under the rubble pinning the finely dressed man, a warped black flame surged up, thin and shrill like glass scraping glass.

The black fire wavered and set into a figure Aphelia knew, a heat‑haze silhouette that sharpened to gray, ragged hair and a rogue’s grin—her former friend, Phoenix.

But now he reeked of dissonance that made her skin crawl, a rot-sweet presence that clung like flies, beyond words and impossible to share air with.

Her chest tightened. “Phoenix, I still don’t understand why you drew your blade on me that day...”

She looked at him and let out a small sigh, a storm of flavors churning in her heart. Her eyes didn’t blur; they gleamed like winter steel, heavy with killing intent.

“...but you’ve sunk this far into madness. I won’t hesitate!”

She raised her spear. The hovering blades of light shattered. They poured into torrents and gathered into a vast silver-white sea, a moonlit tide swelling to drown the sky.

Roland flashed in at Phoenix’s side, long blade in hand. He looked worse, and the blade crackled like a living thing charred to black, shedding scorched flakes like bark.

Phoenix flicked a pinch of black sparks and pressed them into Roland’s body. In a breath, wounds on flesh and steel kindled with night-fire and knit shut like stitches of shadow.

“Aphelia, then come—fight me! Let’s see if I burn you to ash, or you cut me down again!” His challenge cracked like thunder over tinder.

Facing that ocean of light, Phoenix felt no fear. His grin twisted wider as black blaze froze into a longsword in his grip, night poured and hardened into steel.

Aphelia wouldn’t let him draw unopposed. The instant his hand closed on the hilt, light‑cannons fell in a meteor storm from the silver sea.

A keening cry ripped from the blaze. Fire roared up around Phoenix, and the whole arena caught like a dry forest, rising to stand against the silver sea like two oceans colliding.

The warped fire-sea climbed. Behind Phoenix, a savage shape gathered—wings like furnace doors—a raptor born of blaze, an immortal phoenix reborn in fire.

Silver radiance fell true from heaven. The scorching light drowned Phoenix in an instant, divine might churning the warped fire-sea and smashing the ground beneath him like a hammer of dawn.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me... this? Aphelia, you really have gotten weak!” His scorn fizzed like acid.

The roar from within the blaze made Aphelia’s face harden. The silver sea bombarded again from above. She left no gaps, no mercy. It only earned Phoenix’s wild laughter. Twisted flame surged up, coiling like a serpent around the falling waterfall of silver and lunging for her vitals.

This time, she failed to stop the onrushing blaze. It caught her off guard, and the silver light in her hands guttered like a candle in a gale.

The cause was simple. A gray longsword had skewered her waist. Deathly ash poured from it like maggots clinging to bone, corroding the wound and unspooling her power.

“You’re something else, True God. Killing you is really not easy!” Roland bared his teeth, his words sharp as iron filings.

Battlelust poured off him like heat. Half his body had already dissolved; only his torso held. The rest had become the gray miasma driving that blade into Aphelia.

Aphelia had never understood Roland’s sudden vanishings. Only now—feeling that gray, decaying breath lance into her—did the curtain pull back.

He hadn’t vanished. He’d made himself “die” for a heartbeat, snuffing his lamp to slip the eye.

In death, he turned into that gray, blade‑like rot. He slid past her barrages, and of course she couldn’t sense a “dead” man. When needed, he surged back like the flood.

Understanding came too late. The gray breath slowly numbed her nerves, rotting her body with it. Her arms withered like dead branches, and she could no longer hold Violet. She watched Violet slip free and drift downward like a leaf.

A storm of despair and madness slammed through her mind-sea. Blood veined her black eyes. Her decaying body refused her orders, and she could only watch Violet slide from her arms.

In that instant, flame and rot meant nothing. She howled like a madwoman and forced those dead‑wood arms to clamp like a vise around the blade in her belly.

As she tensed to wrench it free, warped black flame turned to blades and stabbed through her again. It sheared off her rotted arms and nailed her in place like an insect.

“Aphelia, watch your lover die with your eyes wide open! Taste the agony we endured through all those long winters!”

Phoenix’s venomous voice hissed at her ear. His broken grin was nauseating. Black fire became endless chains, spilling from the blade—one after another—piercing her and carrying Roland’s rot to every corner of her body.

Aphelia had no room for his words. She only wanted to catch the falling Violet. But her body was out of her hands. The perforating pain had gone numb, and a blood‑loss fog coiled through her skull.

Yet that single thought kept her eyes pried open, as if cradling an endless fire.

Panic surged. What do I do?

A thousand thoughts streaked through her mind, and none she could do. The silver sea had guttered with her weakness and drowned beneath the endless fire. From the neck up she still felt whole, but what could that do?

Helpless. Weak. In pain. In despair.

A flood of darkness crashed through her mind. She tried to scream and no sound came. She tried to fight and no strength answered. Even faithless Aphelia found herself praying.

If there’s anyone who can save her—god or demon, it doesn’t matter—take everything I am. Take it all!

No one answered Aphelia’s cry. She could only watch that frail figure fall into the fire‑sea and vanish without a trace. At that murderous heat, how could an unguarded person live—a snowflake on iron?

“How is it, Aphelia? Does it hurt? Helpless, aren’t you? Watch closely. I’ll keep breaking everyone close to you...”

As Violet’s silhouette was erased in the fire, the light left Aphelia’s pupils at once. Her awareness sank like a stone to the floor of her mind‑sea. As for Phoenix and Roland?

Their snarls blurred. Their venomous voices stayed outside, while those powers tore her body at will behind walls of ice.

The deepest part of her mind-sea lay drowned in darkness, a midnight tide.

“That’s not the person I know.”

A soft, sultry voice drifted out of the dark like perfume at night, making Aphelia start, then sink again.

Only then did she realize how much the one who slipped from her arms meant. With her gone, Aphelia felt like a lamp out of oil, too spent even to struggle.

“Then tell me—do you want the power to destroy them?”

From the dark stepped a girl near‑identical to Aphelia. She held an Obsidian Scepter and wore feathered robes. A black great serpent coiled around her—Uroboros, the shadow‑mirror who once fought Aphelia for her body.

“And if I take it, what then? Can you bring her back?”

Time in the mind-sea crawled slower than the world. Aphelia sat in a corner, knees hugged, a wilted flower.

At her question, Uroboros sniffed and slapped her without hesitation. While Aphelia stared, she caught her arm and hauled her up like a yank from cold water.

“Reviving one person? Something that simple—do you think I can’t?”

That one “simple” sentence swept through her like a prairie fire, reigniting hope and hauling her up from the abyss of despair.

Staring at that flawless face, Aphelia’s heart hammered like a drum. She seized Uroboros’s arm and ground the words out between her teeth.

“Do you mean it?”

“I do.”

Uroboros even pretended to ponder. Before Aphelia’s patience snapped, she showed a little devil’s smile, a crescent blade.

“Take my power. Whatever you are, take everything that’s mine!”

Aphelia clamped both hands on Uroboros’s arms, eyes blood‑red, like a drowning woman clutching straw, and shouted through her teeth.

“Looks like you’ve got the guts to run with demons. Then...”

Uroboros pried her hands free and, before she could react, shoved her hard like off a cliff-edge.

The flat mind‑sea split open into a bottomless chasm. A violent drop tore through Aphelia’s head and snapped her fully awake.

“...go drag your own power out and bring it to me!”